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From June 14 to 16, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department alums Scot Chisholm ’04 and Pat Walsh ’03 hosted a biennial three-day conference called “The Collaborative” for nonprofits and businesses doing world-changing socially innovative work. Chisholm and Walsh are the co-founders of Classy, a San Diego company that provides online fundraising technology to nonprofits and other “social enterprises.” The event was held at Cruiseport in the Boston Seaport district.See Boston Globe article.

Engineering is undoubtedly one of the most demanding majors at any university. Engineering students wouldn’t want it any other way. But that engineering degree of difficulty didn’t stop a passel of hard-pressed engineering students from standing out as intercollegiate competitors, sports stars, and Renaissance students this past year.

Brian Mullen, who earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at UMass Amherst, has been named one of The 2016 MedTechBoston 40 Under 40 Healthcare Innovators. Mullen is the co-founder and CEO of Therapeutic Systems and is the Innovation Strategy Manager at Brigham Innovation Hub.

On Saturday, May 7, the College of Engineering and Dean Tim Anderson celebrated the successful completion of another academic year by paying tribute to several award-winning students, honoring this year’s outstanding faculty award winners, and sending some 400 seniors into the engineering profession with words of wisdom, advice, and good humor.

During the 2015-2016 academic year, the College of Engineering was fortunate to have six talented new faculty members join us from all four departments. Our new academics included John Klier, the head of the Chemical Engineering (ChE) Department, Simos Gerasimidis and Kara Peterman of the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department, Juan Jiménez and Yubing Sun of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE)Department, and Guangu Xu of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department.

In late April, the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department held its annual banquet to celebrate some of the department’s stars. Dr. Bernd Schliemann, the senior lecturer in the MIE department, was presented with the award for Outstanding Mechanical Engineering Professor, while Associate Professor Jenna Marquard received the award for Outstanding Industrial Engineering Professor.

On April 26 the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department held its annual Senior Design Project competition, the climax and showcase event for the MIE capstone course, “MIE 415: Design of Mechanical Systems.” The course and its year-end competition are considered “the integrative culminating experience” of the education in the MIE department. See pictures from the event in Engineering's Spring 2016 photo album.

Three out of the six teams that won prizes in this year’s $65,000 University of Massachusetts Innovation Challenge Final Competition were spearheaded by engineering students. The three engineering winners were third-place finisher Brobar and two other finalists, Glow and Lumme. Coordinated by the Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship, an Isenberg-based initiative that promotes entrepreneurship across the UMass Amherst campus, this culminating event of the multi-stage Innovation Challenge featured a Shark Tank-style contest presented to six judges and an enthusiastic audience.

Dean Tim Anderson has announced that faculty members Erin Baker of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department, Joseph Bardin of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, and Wei Fan of the Chemical Engineering (ChE) Department have been selected as outstanding faculty in the College of Engineering for 2016.

Four College of Engineering undergraduate students were among the eight so-called “Rising Researchers” throughout the whole university campus as designated by the UMass Amherst website Research Next (Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity for a Brighter Future). All four engineering winners were recently profiled, along with the four other Rising Researchers from across the UMass campus, on Research Next. See entire article.